by Brenda Novak
She opened the refrigerator. Beer, a cube of butter and some eggs. Not much better.
Sitting down, because her empty stomach was making her a little light-headed, she considered her options. She could make tuna salad. Or she could go to the store, spend her last twenty dollars on groceries and make a meal of which she could be proud.
Somehow, after her mother’s poor reception, the rejection she’d experienced while attempting to find a job, and facing one of Andy’s cousins, she needed to be able to contribute—even more than she needed money. Getting up, she grabbed her purse and headed back into town.
GLANCING AT HIS WATCH, Booker realized it was nearly eleven o’clock. Much too late to tear apart the wheels and repack the bearings on Helen Dobbs’s Chevy Suburban, which was next on his list.
Shoving himself out from beneath the red Mustang he’d just fixed, he dodged the space heater that hummed nearby and crossed to the sink at the corner of the shop. He’d let his full-time mechanic, Chase Gardner, leave hours ago. Delbert had taken Bruiser and wandered over to the Honky Tonk at nine o’clock to play some pool. But Booker had kept working. For once, he wasn’t interested in hanging out at the Honky Tonk. And he sure as hell didn’t feel like going home. Not with Katie there. Word was spreading that she was staying with him. He’d been hearing about it all day.
“Hey, I hear Katie’s in town…You two back together…? Is she finished with Andy…? Why is she staying with you instead of her parents?”
In retrospect, Booker wasn’t sure exactly how he’d wound up with Katie under his roof. There was her smoking car, then the rain, then her mother standing at the door looking down her nose at both of them. And suddenly he had a roommate.
It was just plain bad luck that he’d come across her before anyone else had.
Peeling off the heavy coveralls he typically wore over his clothes in winter, he pushed up the sleeves of his long-sleeved T-shirt, lathered his hands and arms with laundry detergent and used a brush to scrub off the grease. In the extra hours he’d spent at the shop, he’d worked on Katie’s car, which he’d towed into town first thing this morning, and finished repairing a Mustang and a Nissan truck. He was tempted to keep working through the night. Heaven knew he had enough backlog. But he had to go home sometime, or he knew he wouldn’t be worth anything tomorrow.
The telephone rang. It had rung at about ten, while he was working under the Mustang, but he hadn’t wanted to talk to anyone badly enough to interrupt what he was doing. Now he thought maybe Delbert hadn’t been able to catch a ride home, as he normally did if Booker wasn’t around, so he headed into the small front office.
“Hello?” He propped the handset against his shoulder while he finished drying his hands on the paper towel he’d brought with him.
“Is everything okay?”
Not Delbert—Katie. Mildly surprised, Booker threw the paper towel in the garbage. “Of course. Why?”
“I thought maybe there’d been an emergency.”
“No.”
“So what’ve you been doing?”
“Working.”
“Just working?”
“Were you expecting something else?”
“You didn’t think to let me know you wouldn’t be coming home tonight?”
“Was I supposed to let you know?”
“Well, I assumed—I mean, I made…” She sighed. “Never mind.”
“What?”
“Nothing. Forget it,” she said and hung up.
Booker blinked at the phone, then called her back, but she didn’t answer.
Rubbing his temples, he gave a long sigh. One day. She’d been there one day. And it was already one day too many—for a variety of reasons.
BOOKER SHOOK HIS HEAD as he read Katie’s note taped to the refrigerator. There are plenty of leftovers if you’re hungry. K.
“Smells good in here,” Delbert said, coming in from the mudroom, where he’d just taken off his boots.
Booker opened the fridge and gazed inside to see a large pan of lasagna, a green salad, a foil-wrapped loaf of garlic bread and a pitcher of lemonade. Judging by the number of pans drying in the drainer next to the sink, Katie had gone to a lot of effort.
He felt a little guilty for not bothering to let her know he wouldn’t be home. He’d considered calling but refused to feel as though he needed to check in. It wasn’t as though he owed her anything. Two years ago, he’d asked her to marry him. She’d turned him down flat, then she’d left town with another man. That hardly obligated him.
“There’s food in the fridge if you want to eat,” he told Delbert.
Delbert was feeding Bruiser, who’d actually started out as Booker’s dog. Earl Wallace, owner of the local feed store, had found him roaming around his back lot. When no one claimed him, Booker stepped in to keep him from going to the pound. But Delbert moved in about the same time, and Booker simply couldn’t compete with the kind of love and devotion Delbert lavished on the dog. Bruiser became Delbert’s dog and began shadowing his every move. Now the pair were almost inseparable.
Delbert got Bruiser some fresh water before pulling the lasagna out of the fridge. Booker headed into the living room, where he could hear the television. He wanted to talk to Katie, to find out whether she’d spoken to her parents today or made any decisions about her future. He recognized the difficulty of her situation. He blamed Andy for much of it. But he was determined not to get personally involved with Katie again—on any level. Which meant they had to make other arrangements as soon as possible.
The television flickered in the corner, providing the room’s only light. Booker could see Katie lying on the couch in front of it, but when he drew closer, he realized she was asleep.
He was just deciding whether to wake her, so they could get their little talk out of the way, when the telephone rang. Who’d be calling at midnight? he wondered and grabbed the cordless phone off its base.
“Hello?”
Whoever was on the other end slammed down the receiver.
“Was that my parents?” Katie asked, obviously struggling to wake up.
“Maybe.” He replaced the phone. “Why? Are you expecting them to call?”
She blinked up at him. Her mascara was smudged, her face bore the imprint of the fabric covering the couch, and her hair stuck up on one side. She looked her worst. But he didn’t care. His mind immediately conjured up the feel of that soft pouty mouth beneath his and the expression in her blue eyes when he’d first cupped her breast….
Resenting how the past two years seemed to fall away so easily, he reminded himself that what they’d had was over. For good.
“Not really.” She tried to smooth down her hair. “I…I thought they might try to contact me. You know, just to check up.”
Her brittle smile and casual tone didn’t ring true, but Booker refused to feel any sympathy. He needed to get rid of her, and he needed to do it fast, before his memories undid all the progress he’d made over the past two years. “Maybe we should call them in the morning,” he said.
She grimaced and stared at the phone. “If they wanted to talk to me, they would’ve done so by now, don’t you think?”
He settled in the recliner. “What about your father? Have you tried contacting him? Maybe he doesn’t feel quite as strongly as your mother does.”
“Maybe,” she said, but her voice held no hope. And Booker knew her father usually took a harder line than her mother did. “I—I’ll stop by the bakery tomorrow.”
“Good.” Booker thought perhaps he should visit the bakery beforehand and try to rouse Don to his familial duty.
“What did you do today?” he asked, even though he already knew a little about her movements. Lester Greenwalt had stopped by to pick up the flat he’d brought over for repair, and mentioned that Katie had visited him looking for work. Why she’d applied at an insurance office, Booker couldn’t say. He’d assumed the beauty shop would be her first stop.
“I put in a few job applications
,” she said.
“Did you go by Hair and Now?”
“I popped in this afternoon. Why?”
“Was Rebecca around?”
“For a while. Until she went into the back room to take her temperature. Then she rushed off to meet Josh.”
The baby thing again. Rebecca wasn’t giving up, yet every time it didn’t work out she got that much more upset. “Didn’t she tell you she’d hire you back?”
“We talked about it briefly.”
“And?”
“I’m going to try something different for a while.”
From all indications, she was on her last dollar. Now wasn’t the time to be selective. “Why?” He scowled to let her know he didn’t agree.
She scowled right back at him. “Maybe I need a change of pace.”
“Katie, I towed the Cadillac to my shop and got it running again, but—”
“How much do I owe you for that?” she interrupted, worry clouding her face.
“Six hundred dollars.”
She winced.
“That’s giving you a good deal,” he said because it was true. Six hundred dollars represented his costs in labor and parts, nothing for profit. “You cracked the block, and I had to have the engine rebuilt. It took my top mechanic nearly all day. I worked on it some more tonight, and we’re still not quite finished. I’m waiting for another part to come in.”
“I appreciate the effort,” she said, “but you didn’t even ask me if…if I wanted it fixed.”
“What were you planning to do? Leave it on the side of the road?”
“No, I…” She closed her eyes and rubbed her temples. “I hadn’t decided, I guess.”
Silence fell, during which Booker could hear Delbert talking to Bruiser in the kitchen.
“How much is the car worth out here, if I wanted to sell it?” Katie asked after a few seconds.
Booker couldn’t supply an exact figure, but he knew it wouldn’t be much. “I don’t know.”
“Well, it’s probably not worth the $4,000 I paid for it, but as soon as I sell it, I’ll give you the money.”
God, she was that desperate? What had happened in the two years she’d been gone? “I’m not going to let you sell your car,” he said flatly.
Her troubled eyes finally met his. “But I can’t pay you, Booker. Not now, anyway. I don’t even know when.”
Booker had dreamed of running into Katie again, thousands of times. She’d hurt him so deeply when she left that he’d thought he’d like nothing better than to find her penniless and repentant. But he felt no triumph. Only anger, plenty of anger, directed at her and Andy. Maybe he didn’t have a family who’d supported him all the way through college, like Andy’s. Maybe he wasn’t a slick talker with wrinkle-free clothes and a pretty face. But he would’ve starved before letting Katie go without. “What happened in San Francisco?” he finally asked. “Why hasn’t Andy been taking care of you?”
She drew up her legs and hugged them against her. “You can be so old-fashioned,” she said with a slight grimace. “I wouldn’t need anyone to take care of me if it wasn’t for this baby. I was working in a nice salon, making good money. I was the one paying all the bills. But then—”
He waited when her words drifted off, watching the emotions play across her face.
“—then I got pregnant and the pregnancy hasn’t been going well.”
A trickle of unease heightened Booker’s senses, telling him the story was about to get a hell of a lot worse. “What does that mean?”
She shrugged, but it was hardly a careless movement. “I can’t work on my feet.”
“Or…”
“Or I could lose the baby, okay? That’s why I can’t cut hair. That’s why I can’t go back to Hair and Now.”
Releasing a long sigh, Booker wiped his face with one hand. “And you have no savings.”
“No. Andy made sure of that. He barely waited until I could make the money before he spent it.”
“Wasn’t he bringing home a paycheck of his own?”
She shook her head. “I tried to get him to work, but—” She fell silent. “Never mind. I’m sure you don’t want to hear about that.”
Booker’s heart was pounding against his chest. He wasn’t even sure why. Maybe it was because, painful though it might be, he did want to hear the details. “What about Andy’s parents?”
“What about them?” she asked. “Have you ever met them?”
“No, but from what his cousins say, they’re pretty damn supportive of their only boy. According to LeAnn and her brother, Todd, he never had to work a day to put himself through school.”
“His parents cut him off a few months after we reached San Francisco.”
“Why would they do that after paying his way until then?”
She turned her attention to the remote and muted the television, but he got the impression it was just to give herself something to do so she wouldn’t have to look at him. “They had…reason.”
“Are you going to tell me what that reason is?”
She dropped the remote into her lap. “I’d rather not talk about it.”
“I’d like to know.”
“Fine.” A touch of belligerence entered her voice. “They came to visit us in San Francisco and were pretty disappointed by what they saw, okay? At that stage, Andy was hardly someone to be proud of.”
He raised his eyebrows in place of demanding an explanation, but she got the point. Groaning, she rested her forehead on her knees. “Andy rarely bothered to come home. When he did, he was usually wasted.”
“You mean drunk?”
“High, although he drank, too. He got involved in the party scene almost the first week we lived there.”
Booker didn’t feel he could say much about Andy’s partying. There’d been a rough patch in his own life when he’d deadened the pain with whatever he could beg, borrow, buy or find. And he’d acted out in other ways, too, and paid a heavy price. Only now, years later, was he glad his actions had caught up with him. Prison had changed him. Forced him to realize that his behavior was more self-destructive than anything else. Taught him to appreciate the simple things in life. He wasn’t proud of his past, but he’d finally come to terms with who and what he was.
“By the time his parents left, his mother was crying,” Katie went on. “And Andy’s father told him not to bother calling with any more sob stories about being laid off or losing his last paycheck. He said they weren’t going to send him any more money and, as far as I know, Andy hasn’t heard from them since. I’m guessing he’ll contact them now, though. I’m not sure he can survive without me there to pay the rent.”
“So his folks don’t know about the baby?”
“Not yet.”
“Are you going to tell them?”
“I don’t know. Andy wanted me to have an abortion. Right now, I feel the baby’s pretty much exclusively mine.”
Wonderful. Katie’s life was the complete mess he’d been hoping for since she’d rejected him, yet Booker couldn’t feel good about it.
He got slowly out of the recliner. “Don’t worry about paying for the car. You need some way to get around.”
“Booker, I can’t accept—”
“We can settle up whenever you have the money,” he said brusquely and started to leave before he could ask the one question that burned in his mind. But he only got as far as the door. Then he stopped, turned, and asked it anyway. “You love this guy?”
Katie twisted a lock of hair around one finger as she stared at him. He could see a shine in her eyes and thought maybe they were filling with tears, but the room was too dark to tell for sure. “I don’t think I even know what love is,” she said softly.
THE SMELL OF freshly baked doughnuts enveloped Booker the moment he entered Don and Tami’s Bakery the following morning at six o’clock. The bell went off over the door, but Don barely glanced up before going right back to what he was doing—transferring fresh apple fritters, glazed dough
nuts and maple bars from rolling metal trays to the display case.
“I need to talk to you,” Booker said.
“We don’t have anything to say to each other,” Katie’s father responded.
Booker knew Don didn’t like him. Don was one of the locals who still took his car to a neighboring town or to Boise for service and repair. But Booker wasn’t asking for his business. He just wanted Don to take Katie off his hands and to see that she was safe and well cared for. “I think we do,” he said. “Katie’s staying out at my place.”
Don shifted to the bottom shelf and start lining up custard and jelly-filled doughnuts. “That’s what I hear.”
“She’s pregnant.”
Don craned his head around, as if he expected Tami to come out of the back room where they did their baking, but no one appeared. “I’m afraid that’s her problem. We tried to tell her what she was in for with Andy, but she wouldn’t listen. He lived here in Dundee, off those cousins of his, for months and never got a job. What does that say about him?”
Booker didn’t want to get into an argument over Andy. “You’re her parents,” he said. He knew from experience that parents didn’t always care. But from what he’d seen in the past, Don and Tami Rogers were certainly more supportive than his own parents had been.
“She’s of age.” Don finally stopped long enough to catch and hold Booker’s gaze. Eyes narrowing, mouth tightening, he added, “So don’t come in here thinking you can criticize us. She probably wouldn’t have made the mistakes she made if she hadn’t gotten involved with you first.”
Booker felt the old anger—the dark kind of anger he hadn’t felt for years—coil inside him. He’d loved Katie. That should have redeemed him somehow. But because of his reputation, it didn’t seem to matter. Even though his reputation didn’t have a damn thing to do with any of this. “Don’t you care what happens to her?” he demanded.
“We love her enough to let her feel the natural consequences of her actions.” Don wiped powdered sugar from his hands onto a towel. “How will she ever learn if we’re always there to rescue her?”
“There’s a baby involved,” Booker said. “The baby hasn’t done anything wrong.”